Also, as I have said a million kajillion times? People who work in publishing deserve to eat too. Not just authors. Although authors also deserve this! Publishing isn’t the music industry. Editors spend many, many hours working on those books you like so that they’re readable. (Sometimes you can tell when an author has got too famous and they clearly have stopped listening to their editors. You can see the quality of the books decline.) Illustrators drew that map of the book’s fantasyland at the front; illustrators drew that double-page spread of a mediaeval town with the hundreds of people walking around. Photographers took the colour photos in the glossy insert. Permissions staff called around and cajoled that Scandinavian museum to secure the right to print that photo of that Viking ship. Typesetters and graphic designers made the interior readable, and made the eye catching cover. Heck, editors made sure that each paragraph of text was tagged correctly so that the book could be turned into an ebook, and checked it once it was done to make sure it hadn’t all gone weird in the conversion. If it’s a nonfiction book, there’s even a chance that the publisher sought out an author or author team to write the book, not the other way around – especially for textbooks.
There is an extraordinary amount of work that goes into publishing a book. Authors spend a horrific amount of time on each one, and so do staff at publishing houses. Almost none of us get paid particularly well. In my first job as an editor, I was alarmed to discover that I could get a 10k raise by quitting and going to work as a receptionist. I’ve been a receptionist before. It didn’t require me to work overtime, or to have a university qualification. I’ve played Solitaire on the computer as a receptionist. Being an editor had me regularly stay late at the office.
The thing about ‘x book has sold so well! All the money should go to the author’ is that it shows you don’t understand how publishing works. Most books don’t make very much for the publisher. Some don’t cover the cost of production. The reason why publishers can keep producing books, and can publish interesting or risky books, is those rare success stories. In Australia, our local publisher Allen & Unwin had the distribution rights for Harry Potter, which they did not produce. But the money they got for distributing the series bankrolled books by Australian authors. It meant they could publish Garth Nix’s children books, a beautiful coffee table book on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, or the Phryne Fisher series.
Pirating books won’t hurt the few executives who make money at publishing. But it will hurt authors – most of whom don’t make enough from writing to classify their work as anything other than a hobby – and it hurts people like me, who make authors works look good.
Pirating books shuts down small publishers, or otherwise they get bought out by the same big publishers you rail against. Ours is not an industry with a large safety net. We really, I don’t know how to get this across to you, do not make much money. The reason why Hachette is large and makes a lot of money is because Hachette is an umbrella publisher that has something like sixty smaller publishers under it. I can’t remember the exact number from when I worked there, and it’s likely changed since, anyway. If you don’t want the five big publishers owning everything, you need to support the smaller publishers. Which means buying their books, or at the very least not pirating them.
Most people who work in publishing do it because we really love books. We’re really not in it to make money. Which is good, because people who work in publishing are really poorly paid. I have met more than a few who leave after five or ten years, who go to work in the government, or at universities, or in marketing, because the poor pay and the stress has finally got to them.
And you know what? If capitalism ceased to exist tomorrow, I’d be delighted to spend my days making books for no renumeration. I love books. I love editing! But that’s not the world we live in, and I don’t want to see my tiny industry basically cease to exist. I’ve already seen the number of jobs in publishing shrink and shrink in my country. I’ve seen publishers disappear and get swallowed up by others.
Authors and publishing staff are not the enemy. Why the fuck shouldn’t they get paid for their fucking labour.
